Ezra Derangement Syndrome #156: Islamic Lawfare Shocker!

Yet another legal flensing for Ezra Levant as the alt-right blubberboy’s fevered banging on the doors of the Supreme Court, imploring succor from an eye-watering $80K defamation judgment, went predictably unanswered.

Lügenpants updated his followers on this awful setback for truth and justice at standwithezra.ca, his perpetual online begathon for someone else to pay the bills for his ever-growing list of legal misadventures:

“Bad news in the battle for freedom of speech: the Supreme Court of Canada refused to hear my appeal of the defamation judgment against me, brought some eight years ago by Khurrum Awan.

“Awan is the former youth president of the Canadian Islamic Congress. As you know, one of the reasons I lost was that the judge ruled that calling Awan an anti-Semite was defamatory.

“But Awan used to be the youth president of an anti-Semitic group — the Canadian Islamic Congress. They even called for the legalization of terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah.

“But the judge ruled it was defamatory for me to call their former youth president anti-Semitic. Because Awan denied he was, and said he never knew about his organization’s infamous misconduct. The judge ruled I did not prove it was factually true. Even though Awan himself testified at trial that he agreed it’s reasonable for people to call certain statements by the Canadian Islamic Congress anti-Semitic.

“I appealed that trial judgment, and I lost. And today the Supreme Court said they won’t hear a further appeal.”

“But what worries me more is that a legal precedent has now been set: if you call a leader of an anti-Semitic group, ‘anti-Semitic’, you can be sued for defamation.

“Every newspaper columnist, every political activist, every Jewish or Christian student in university must now be extremely careful. There is outrageous anti-Semitism on campuses these days. That’s not illegal. But calling members of those groups anti-Semitic can be illegal, if you don’t say it in just the right way.”

A chilling prospect indeed, were only it true. In point of fact, one of the only areas in which the appeal court actually agreed with our little pisher was on his right to opine at length and without the formality of providing evidence, that Awan (or whoever) hates the Jews:

“The appellant submits that the trial judge erred by finding that calling the respondent an anti-Semite in the context of the human rights proceeding, because of his association with Dr. [Mohamed] Elmasry, was a statement of fact that had to be proved true, rather than a comment or opinion to which the defence of fair comment could apply,” Ontario Court of Appeal Justice Kathryn Feldman wrote in a unanimous decision.

“I accept this submission. Unlike in her fact versus opinion analysis of the ‘liar’ statements, the trial judge did not apply the reasonable person test, nor did she consider whether the statement was a conclusion or judgment formed by the appellant based on the respondent’s association with Dr. Elmasry. She also did not consider that it was stated in an editorial blog discussing a controversial matter of public interest.”

Alas, there was a catch:

“Although the trial judge erred in her characterization of the appellant’s blog statement that the respondent was an anti-Semite as a statement of fact rather than opinion, the defence of fair comment cannot apply if the statement was made, as the trial judge found, with malice.”

In short, then, it wasn’t the allegations of Jew-booery so much as the nasty wee hard-on our protagonist had evidently developed for Awan, or calling him a “liar” approximately a bazillion times, or failing to correct numerous nosestretchers, or contact the plaintiff for clarification, etc, etc.

Pace Lügenpants, factually-challenged accusations of anti-Semitism remain as ‘legal’ as they ever were in the pre-Awan v. Levant era. And a good thing, too: